John Goodman writes: Many people lost the insurance they were promised they could keep. Many lost access to the doctor they were promised they could continue to see. Premiums have doubled. Deductibles have tripled. Provider networks are so narrow, people with serious health problems are routinely denied access to the best doctors and the best hospitals.
One of the strange features of the national health care conversation is how it has evolved. What is often referred to as Obamacare began as an attempt to insure the uninsured. In fact, the initial Congressional Budget Office estimates predicted the Affordable Care Act would be largely successful in doing just that. Yet it was the Senate’s Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, who identified the political problem with that goal early on. About 95% of those who vote already have insurance, Schumer noted. So Obamacare was promising to spend a great deal of money on people who don’t vote.
Critics of President Trump’s response to the coronavirus crisis characterize it as knee-jerk, spur-of-the-moment, and grasping at any straw within reach. In fact, many of the executive actions we have seen in the past few days reflect a new approach to health policy that has been underway almost since the day Donald Trump was sworn into office.
When people think about drug pricing in the United States, they tend to think of the sky-high prices of some newer drugs. High prices do cause real problems. Some people in need may go without. People may also go without needed drugs because prices are too low.
We need to remove the most unfair, most anti-work, most anti-saving provisions of the tax code – ones that burden the middle-class. These include a social Security earnings penalty that can push senior workers into a 95% marginal tax rate, a tax on nonsocial security income that even hits tax-exempt bonds, and unfair restrictions on part-time workers and the self-employed.
Larry Wedekind writes: The treatment of choice, almost everywhere, is called Medication Assisted Treatment (M.A.T.) and it involves substitute drugs. It has an 80% failure rate. There is a treatment that involves microcurrent neurofeedback and a recovery support team. It costs one-fifth as much and has a high probability of success. What the Trump administration can do: create CPT (payment) codes for this new method of treatment. What Congress can do: reform the Obamacare exchanges.
The Liberty, Ecology and Prosperity blog is about appreciating and protecting the environment, using the tools of economics. The blog manager is Jane Shaw Stroup, a former senior fellow of the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC). John Baden, father of the New Resource Economics, is the lead off blogger.
President Donald Trump says he wants health reform that will be better than Obamacare, better than what we had before Obamacare, and better than the Democrats’ Medicare for All. And he’s not alone. Numerous surveys show that health reform remains a top priority for Americans, who are concerned about high costs, access, and choice.
She proposes to abolish the ObamaCare exchanges—a signature Democratic accomplishment—and enroll participants in something resembling Medicare Advantage, a program expanded during the George W. Bush administration. That’s better than anything Ms. Harris’s Democratic rivals have proposed. It’s also better than many Republican reform ideas.
The plan was prepared for the Trump administration by John C. Goodman (father of Health Savings Accounts) and Marie Fishpaw (Heritage Foundation) and published by National Review Online. The plan features such patient friendly ideas as portable health insurance and doctor consultations by means of phone, email and Skype.